applying a little cpr to the digital heart of scotland

The week beginning April 25th had started with snow and finished with some sparkling Spring sunshine on the Spey. Both Craigellachie and Dufftown were buzzing and the already limited parking options shrank with cheerful abandon by the day. It was the best of times, and it was the best of times. David Mckenzie of Speyside…

With the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival 2017 coming up in April, I set myself the task of capturing some elusive key part of that spirit. But what was the spirit of Speyside? Was it the surly, contrary Scots character of myth? The patient, slow burning wisdom that Speysiders showed in their judgement? The frankly…

Have a bit of a spring in my step this autumn, owing to me buying my first Canon dSLR camera. It’s an entry level rig that should come in handy for my daughter’s Scottish Higher in Photography and day to day business in web design. These were taken during the last week of October in…

On Sunday June 5th 2016, I paid a visit to the Tomintoul bothy where ‘Monocled Mutineer’, Percy Toplis spent his last few days alive. It was almost 96 years to the day that he died in a volley of bullets on a single track road near Carlisle. The bothy lies on the A939 road from…

01. I didn’t have thousands of pounds to spend, so I did it all myself. First off, a basic 5-page website could cost you as little as £350. Depending on the size of your product catalogue a reasonable web designer could even add a Paypal shopping cart to the site for £150 or so. Whilst…

He provided signposts in a world of infinite junctions, a road map in a world of infinite signs. Discovering Umberto Eco at University was a bit like discovering sex. During the long bleak months of winter 1990 I’d read his novel, The Name of The Rose back to back with Travels in Hyperreality — a witty…

Latest announcement from Google confirms that mobile-friendly websites will be given preferential treatment in Google web results from April 2015. Be responsible – get ‘responsive’. Well, we have been speculating about this for a while now, but it seems that ‘mobile-friendliness’ is going to be an increasingly major factor in how websites are going to…

Unlike Percy Toplis, there is no doubt whatsoever that Glasgow’s James Cullen took part in the Etaples Mutiny. We have his Service Records to thank for that, and his service records show that he was sentenced to one year imprisonment for refusing to obey orders at the time the riots at the camp broke out…

“Percy couldn’t have been at the Mutiny in Etaples because that month he was on the troopship, Orantes heading to India with his regiment”. Or so the story goes. It was used to undermine the whole pretext of John Fairley and William Allison’s book, The Monocled Mutineer and it’s been repeated by journalists ever since….

The Haftar Lobby In March 2017, the Conservative Middle East Council published a report entitled ‘Inside Libya: Chaos in the Mediterranean‘. The report pushed for urgent ‘engagement’ with Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar, the self-appointed commander of the Libyan National Army who had spent the best part of 20 years semi-retired in Washington DC. The report was…

On Monday May 22nd 2017, Salman Abedi walked into the foyer at the Manchester Arena and detonated an explosive suicide device. The attack claimed 22 lives including seven children. 14 people have been arrested in connection with the incident. Britain’s Press and Security Services react with surprise at the event, but the warnings were substantial….

With school and work looming it felt wise to try and clear body and mind of all that grueling festive cheer. Temperatures across the Highlands were due to drop from a tropical 8 degrees to a more invigorating three degrees, and with light still being far from generous in these bleak mid-winter months, every effort…

First time I’ve really put any effort into capturing some of the magnificent sunsets we have over Moray and Speyside. Not ventured too far afield as these things pretty hard to predict, so it was really just a case of looking for near-clear skies around 3.00pm and then legging it as fast as I could…

In terms of brightness, that additional 15% made the 2016 Super Moon 15% more difficult to capture. Didn’t do it justice but had fun trying. Here’s several shots taken as it rose above Ben Aigan near Aberlour and above Elgin just before dawn. There’s also a sneaky one of the sunset the previous evening.

Spent a fairly wet and unsettled Saturday afternoon tackling Meall a’ Bhuachaille in the Glenmore Forest Park. This handsome, hulking mound lies some 20km from Aviemore and boasts some terrific views over Loch Morlich and the Rothimurcus Pine Forest. At around 900 metres it’s not a Munro but a Corbett, and the ascent is a…